MOSCOW — Four Russian nationals, and perhaps dozens more, were killed in fighting between pro-government forces in eastern Syria and members of the United States-led coalition fighting the Islamic State, according to Russian and Syrian officials.

A Syrian military officer said that about 100 Syrian soldiers had been killed in the fighting on Feb. 7 and 8, but news about Russian casualties has dribbled out only slowly, through Russian news organizations and social media.

Much about the attack and the associated casualties has been obscured in the fog of war. For reasons that remain unclear, Syrian government troops and some Russian nationals appear to have attacked a coalition position, near Al Tabiyeh, Syria.

The attack occurred in the vicinity of Deir al-Zour, a strategic, oil-rich territory that is coveted by the Syrians. Most of the fatalities were attributed to an American airstrike on enemy columns that was called in by American-backed Kurdish soldiers who believed they were under attack.

I should collect all of your posts and reprint them when he gets impeached. You remember how Roger Stone kept predicting that "Podesta was in the barrel" and Hollary was a goner before major leaks. Clearly, he had a source. Who was it? And supposedly he had some connection with Assange or Guccifer? Well he refused to name his source before the House Intelligence Committee. If his source was innocuous...why not say it?

Why would Assange want to tell Roger Stone before a leak? It doesn't make any sense. So there are two alternatives sources: (1) Russia or (2) the Trump campaign. Why would Russia tell Stone about upcoming leaks unless he was being used as a conduit to the Trump campaign? There was contact with a hacker Guccifer but nothing about the leaks that we know about (and the US intelligence community concluded that he was not the one that did the hacking of DNC or Podesta) and in any case the hackers were part of the Russian government and they are not contacting Stone without authorization. If they were using Stone as a conduit why would Stone be tweeting about it?

What makes the most sense was that Stone had a source in the Trump campaign. Guccifer and Credico (some guy who had Assange and Stone on his show) are just smokescreens being floated as possible sources.

Make him talk! Put him before the grand jury. I bet he takes the Fifth.

freeman3 wrote:I should collect all of your posts and reprint them when he gets impeached. You remember how Roger Stone kept predicting that "Podesta was in the barrel" and Hollary was a goner before major leaks. Clearly, he had a source. Who was it? And supposedly he had some connection with Assange or Guccifer? Well he refused to name his source before the House Intelligence Committee. If his source was innocuous...why not say it?

Why would Assange want to tell Roger Stone before a leak? It doesn't make any sense. So there are two alternatives sources: (1) Russia or (2) the Trump campaign. Why would Russia tell Stone about upcoming leaks unless he was being used as a conduit to the Trump campaign? There was contact with a hacker Guccifer but nothing about the leaks that we know about (and the US intelligence community concluded that he was not the one that did the hacking of DNC or Podesta) and in any case the hackers were part of the Russian government and they are not contacting Stone without authorization. If they were using Stone as a conduit why would Stone be tweeting about it?

What makes the most sense was that Stone had a source in the Trump campaign. Guccifer and Credico (some guy who had Assange and Stone on his show) are just smokescreens being floated as possible sources.

Make him talk! Put him before the grand jury. I bet he takes the Fifth.

Oh, I think he's in less jeopardy than your girl.

Just recently, we've learned of her "sometime" email partner, Sidney Blumenthal, being a source for the dossier. That thing is going to be poisonous. Two Obama stooges have perjured themselves over it--Clapper and Brennan.

Print them all up. Knock yourself out. And, if Trump is impeached, great.

There are many Democrats who have been into impeachment since the election. That is wrong.

We need MORE transparency. This is from a never-Trumper:

The Grassley-Graham memo corroborates the claims in the Nunes memo: The Obama Justice Department and FBI used anonymously sourced, Clinton-campaign generated innuendo to convince the FISA court to issue surveillance warrants against Carter Page, and in doing so, they concealed the Clinton campaign’s role. Though the Trump campaign had cut ties with Page shortly before the first warrant was issued in October 2016, the warrant application was based on wild allegations of a corrupt conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Moreover, the warrant meant the FBI could seize not only Page’s forward-going communications but any past emails and texts he may have stored — i.e., his Trump campaign communications. With its verification by the Grassley-Graham memo, the Nunes memo now has about a thousand times more corroboration than the Steele dossier, the basis of the heinous allegations used by the Justice Department and FBI to get the FISA warrants.

What the Grassley-Graham memo tells us is that the Nunes memo, for all the hysteria about it, was tame. The Grassley-Graham memo tells us that we need not only a full-blown investigation of what possessed the Obama administration to submit such shoddy applications to the FISA court, but of how a judge — or perhaps as many as four judges — rationalized signing the warrants. We need full disclosure — the warrants, the applications, the court proceedings. No more games.

Senators Charles Grassley of Iowa and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina are senior Republicans on the Judiciary Committee (which Grassley chairs, while Graham chairs a relevant subcommittee). As we’ve previously detailed (in a two-part series, here and here), they composed their memo in support of a criminal referral recommending that dossier author Christopher Steele be investigated for making false statements to the FBI (which is a felony). Initially, the senators’ memo was withheld, then it was released with extensive redactions because its contents were largely classified — covering submissions to the FISA court, the secret tribunal established by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But following the release of the Nunes memo — the memo prepared by Republican majority staff of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence led by Representative Devin Nunes (R., Calif.) — Senators Grassley and Graham stepped up their admirable efforts to get more information unsealed . . . so that the public can see it, even if the press prefers not to cover it.

Last Friday, the Nunes memo asserted that the FBI and Justice Department had significantly relied on the unverified Steele dossier to obtain FISA warrants on Page. In the week that followed, House Intelligence Committee Democrats and their media echo chamber bleated about how things had been taken out of context, with some suggesting that there was plenty of other evidence to establish probable cause that Page was acting as a Russian agent. (See my column last Sunday responding to claims by Representative Jerrold Nadler, here.) It was even implied that Nunes & Co. had deceptively reported committee testimony by the FBI’s then deputy director Andrew McCabe that the Steele dossier was essential to this probable-cause showing. We’re not hearing much of that now. No wonder.

Here’s the Grassley-Graham memo on the critical first FISA application, the basis for the warrant granted on October 21, 2016:

The bulk of the application consists of allegations against Page that were disclosed to the FBI by Mr. Steele and are also outlined in the Steele dossier. The application appears to contain no additional information corroborating the dossier allegations against Mr. Page, although it does cite to a news article that appears to be sourced to Mr. Steele’s dossier.

We’ll come to the news article — the stupefying circular attempt to corroborate Steele with Steele. For the moment, suffice it to say that the senators have confirmed the Nunes memo’s account, except with much more information than House Republicans were able to include. Information such as this:

When asked at the March 2017 briefing [of Judiciary Committee leaders] why the FBI relied on the dossier in the FISA applications absent meaningful corroboration — and in light of the highly political motives surrounding its creation — then-Director [James] Comey stated that the FBI included the dossier allegations about Carter Page in the FISA applications because Mr. Steele himself was considered reliable due to his past work with the Bureau. (Emphasis added.) On this score, Grassley and Graham quote directly from the warrant applications: “Based on [Steele’s] previous reporting history with the FBI whereby [Steele] provided reliable information to the FBI, the FBI believes [Steele’s] reporting to be credible.” (Emphasis added.)

I cannot stress enough how irregular this is. It is why there is abundant reason to demand that the judge explain his or her rationale for granting the warrant. As I outlined at greater length last week (here, in section C), in applying for a warrant, the government must establish the reliability of the informants who witnessed the alleged facts claimed to support a probable-cause finding. Steele was not one of those witnesses. He is not the source of the facts. He is the purveyor of the sources — anonymous Russians, much of whose alleged information is based on hearsay, sometimes multiple steps removed from direct knowledge. Steele has not been in Russia since his cover as a British spy was blown nearly 20 years ago. He has sources, who have sources, who have sources . . . and so on. None of his information is better than third-hand; most of it is more attenuated than that.

For purposes of justifying a warrant, it does not matter that, in a totally unrelated investigation (involving corruption at FIFA, the international soccer organization), the FBI judged that the hearsay information provided by Steele, then a British agent, checked out. In his anti-Trump research, Steele could not verify his sources. Furthermore, he was now a former foreign intelligence officer who was then working for private clients — which is the advocacy business, not the search-for-truth business. A judge would need to know whether Steele’s sources were reliable, not whether Steele himself was reliable.

Let that sink in, then think about this contrast: No actual FBI agent, no matter how renowned, would be able to get a judicial warrant based solely on his own reliability as an investigator. Jim Comey, despite having a résumé geometrically more impressive than Steele’s, including Senate confirmations to some of federal law-enforcement’s loftiest positions, would not be given a warrant based on representations to the court that the FBI, the Justice Department, the president, and the Senate all attested to his impeccable reliability. The only reliability that counts is the reliability of the factual informants, not of the investigator who purports to channel the informants. The judge wants to know why the court should believe the specific factual claims: Was the informant truly in a position to witness what is alleged, and if so, does the informant have a track record of providing verified information? The track record of the investigator who locates the sources is beside the point. A judge would need to know whether Steele’s sources were reliable, not whether Steele himself was reliable.